Until we meet again Some catching up to do here! Anyhow, day 6 was all about farewells. To Mine, Maren and Liz, my companions on an intense, revealing, soul-searching journey. This was a small group, just the four of us, so I suppose we all connected pretty well. We were all from different parts of […]
Author: Payal
Thai Diaries (days 4&5)
The creepies and the crawlies Museflower Retreat where I’m staying is in the middle of a jungle. There’s about 2 kilometres of unpaved roads to navigate to get here. While it’s nicely signposted, let’s just say you wouldn’t want to arrive in the dark your first time (unless you’re being picked up, of course). The […]
Thai Diaries (days 2&3)
Let’s get eating! Every weekend, Chiang Rai closes one of its main streets to traffic and converts it into a pop-up market. Food and drink, handicrafts, clothes, trinkets, art, toys—there’s a lot of it about. The walking street, as they call it here, is not to be confused with the night market, which is about […]
Thai Dairies (day 1)
To eVoA or not to eVoA Thailand’s evisa-on-arrival gets a thumbs up from me. The VoA procedure itself is a bit of a fish market at Bangkok (or maybe I’ve just arrived at the wrong times). There is an express counter for the privilege of skipping the queues, but you pay extra for that. The […]
Review: Jinxed by Amy McCulloch
A round of applause to Amy McCulloch for a book (the first of a series) about girls in engineering. That and the the world-building were the two things that got me hooked on Jinxed, even though it ended in a cliffhanger, which I hate. The story is set in a time about 50 years from […]
- Scratchpad
- ...
Thank you for the music, Bernie Wolfe
I am writing this because Bernie Wolfe is dead. Or at least the powers-that-be at Holby City want us to believe that she might be. So, this is not about promiscuous bisexuals, or about dead lesbians (well, it is, but not in that way), or the fact that Bernie is dying to further a white […]
- Social issues
- ...
The Big Bang and the little whimper
**HERE BE SPOILERS** The TL;DR version: I did not like the ending of The Big Bang Theory. Sheldon’s sudden epiphany about his “other family” was reductive, and what happened with Penny (pregnancy) and Amy (makeover) were downright offensive. Read on for the meandering version or skip straight to the comments to vent (or to disagree […]
- Media
- ...
Who decides who cares?
A couple of developments in the past few months have had me thinking about the power of stories and the different ways we experience them. As creators, we have no control over how a reader, viewer or listener may interpret our work, whether they will see it through the same lens we used to create […]
The annual update, version 43
Another trip around the sun and I live to tell the tale. A bit late with this update, mainly because there’s been a lot going on—such as, the #BDB campaign for which I’ve been doing much of the web admin work; a new YA book I started on; another regular assignment to fit into my […]
- Cricket
- ...
Falling from grace
I’ve been involved in many fandoms over the years. Most of them have taken a similar trajectory—the euphoria of discovery; a frenzy of inhaling anything and everything related to the fandom; finding out about the people behind (or part of) it; and either a tapering off of interest levels, or being let down by your […]